‘If I hear any more language like that from you, young lady, you’re in for a jolly good smacked bottom!’

Bill Potts has just sworn, calling her friend Doctor Who (Peter Capaldi) ‘a stupid bloody arse’. Unfortunately for her, she does it in the hearing of his former self, the original Doctor, a role created by William Hartnell and played in 2017, 42 years after Hartnell died, by David Bradley. And his response to her words is a variation on a line ad-libbed by Hartnell back in 1964, and then addressed to the Doctor’s granddaughter, Susan, played by Carole Ann Ford.

There’s an important difference here, in the Doctor’s relationship with the girl he threatens: Susan, a blood-relation, was family, whereas Ms Potts is only a recent acquaintance, who happens to be the traveling companion to his future self. And that changes his character from a gruff, old-fashioned grandfather into someone who assumes the authority to spank any and all young women when he thinks they deserve it – which might be good news for people like me who fantasize extensively about spanking in the TARDIS, but isn’t really true to the character Hartnell created in the mid-1960s.

Bill, the owner of the bottom that stands in danger of smacking, was the 24th and last of the Doctor Who girls, an engaging character enhanced by a winning performance from Pearl Mackie. One fan artist felt moved to sketch what might have happened if things had gone beyond a mere threat, which is more good news for those with a particular interest in the subject, because it’s not just a smacked bottom but a fullscale spanking:

And in fact, there is some evidence (which we’ll come to later on) that this is just what William Hartnell had in mind when he improvised the original threat back in the Sixties!

So why is it that the sketch, and indeed the whole Bill-smacking scenario, leaves me so cold?

Let’s sidestep for a moment into an overdue introduction for anyone who might need it. Doctor Who was a British television series about exploration and adventure in time and space, which ran from 1963 until 1989, returned in an abortive American pilot episode in 1996 and then, more successfully, from 2005. That longevity was in part assured by the idea, developed in 1966, of periodically recasting the Doctor by changing his body, often for a younger-looking model, and with it some surface aspects of his personality. Throughout its run this mercurial alien was joined on his travels by a series of recurring characters, called ‘companions’ in the argot of the series’ fans.

They were usually human, frequently contemporary, and more often than not attractive young women; a short-lived attempt in 1980 to vary the format by replacing the outgoing girl with a teenage boy proved less than felicitous, though there were also male ‘companions’ in the overall mix at various times. And on occasion there were one-off characters who fulfilled the same functions in the short term but were not series regulars and cannot be seriously considered ongoing ‘companions’ of the Doctor, even though some of them sometimes get onto fan-made lists of such characters. Among them were Trojan handmaiden Katarina (Adrienne Hill, 1965),

space secret agent Sara Kingdom (Jean Marsh, 1965-66),

photographer Isobel Watkins (Sally Faulkner, 1968),

surgeon Grace Holloway (Daphne Ashbrook, 1996),

space waitress Astrid Peth (Kylie Minogue, 2007),

and jewel thief Christina de Souza (Michelle Ryan, 2009):

They are not part of our story – but there are a lot of others who are.

So the classic format of the series was fundamentally M/F, albeit not in the narrow sense pertaining directly to the main topic of this site, nor in a way that claims to be a complete take on life or precludes other series doing other things. The central character is an impossibly knowledgeable and wise man with a young female sidekick who will necessarily know less and act less wisely than he does. The point is very well made by Elisabeth Sladen, who played Sarah Jane, who was not only the longest running but also in my book the most spankable Doctor Who girl of them all:

‘She thinks she can stand on her own feet and she’ll always have a bash at things believing she’s right. But somebody normally ends up telling her she’s totally wrong – and it’s usually the Doctor.’

And this built-in M/F dynamic amounts at least to a potential for spanking, albeit one that was rarely recognized and never realized (though in fact the series did several times come close to including an onscreen spanking scene, but never actually got there).

Now, Doctor Who went through some bad patches in its long history, but none as extended as the years that led up to the time of Bill Potts. In the 2010s, it became progressively more involuted and self-aggrandizing, like fan fiction made on a BBC budget, self-strangled with its own back-story and uninterested in engagement with a broader, less committed audience. Worse, it was about to pass through its own vanishing point and lose all meaningful resemblance to the show it previously was: reinvented for a new audience, but reinvented in such a way that it left behind the series many of its old audience bought into. In that sense, Doctor Who effectively ended in 2017, to be replaced by another program with the same title but a completely different tone and values, and of very little interest to me.

It was a gradual transformation, well under way by Capaldi’s time in the leading role, and part of the process was what you might call ‘past-shaming’ its former self, of which an especially distasteful example was bringing back the original Doctor in order to sneer at him for being ‘sexist’. Part, too, was a developing ambivalence about the idea that some viewers might enjoy looking at the young female series regular, making her an object of the dreaded (by some) but (for others) entirely normal ‘male gaze’. And that, I suspect, is one reason why Bill Potts doesn’t do much for me in that way, even though she’s still very much presented in the subordinate position of the traditional sidekick.

I would enjoy seeing any one of her 23 predecessors get a jolly good spanking, whether she’s my ‘type’ or otherwise, a character I like very much indeed or one about whom I might feel mainly lukewarm. One of the fundamentals of my kink is that a girl is always more attractive, and often more likeable, when she is spanked. Bill herself is a character whom I find enormously likeable, but I don’t have any sexual response to her at all, not even on the rare occasions when she is seen from angles like these:

I think it’s because she’s presented in a way that ignores that dimension of the character type, and perhaps even latently discourages that kind of attention. In that respect, one traditional, albeit minor, aspect of the series’ long-term appeal to some viewers had already been given up.

You might think it’s an outrageous stretch to spin a family adventure series in spanking terms (other than as a private fantasy). But of the 24 actresses who were the Doctor Who girls, at least eight can be documented as actually having been spanked at some point in their adult lives and careers: four in spanking scenes, three backstage and two more domestically (in completely different circumstances, but both recounted by the ladies themselves). And yes, 4 + 3 + 2 does equal eight, not nine, because one of them features in two separate categories! Another nine had their bottoms smacked in various contexts, and a further four were threatened with a spanking, making an impressive ‘strike rate’ of 88%.

For comparison, only six (so far as I know) ever bared their bottoms for the camera, which maybe says something just a little unexpected about the relative acceptability of nudity and spanking in the past half-century or so.

That figure of 88% might even be an underestimate, because in the past it was commonplace for younger actresses to have their bottoms casually smacked or pinched by admiring male members of the crew, something that wasn’t often remarked upon because then (even if not now) it was simply normal behavior on the set. And all of them, even including Bill, have been the subject of spanking thoughts from someone in the audience (and I mean someone other than me), sometimes resulting in fan art or fan fiction that doesn’t always belong at the pornographic end of the spectrum.

So although spanking is mostly an incidental element in the history of Doctor Who, it is seldom altogether absent – in fact, a bit like life for those who aren’t (in one way or another) preoccupied with spanking.

In this intermittent series I’m going to discuss the girls in a literally ‘pre-posterous’ way, in reverse order through the program’s history, and giving a certain amount of priority to their posteriors. As you’d expect, the fan-produced spanking material tends to cluster towards more recent times and the actual spankings lean towards the earlier girls. And as you’d also expect, it will all get progressively more straightforward as we travel backward through the years. So that’s a good reason to get the difficult latter days of Doctor Who over and done with early on…

(Alternatively, you can go forwards from the start of the series, from here.)